[This is a guest post written by Ashley Victoria Haddix, an iSchool Field Studies Intern for Fall 2017 in the Prange Collection.]
Ashley Victoria Haddix
During my time with the Prange Collection, I was given the opportunity to process the Mead Smith Karras Papers, a gift collection of her personal and professional papers given by her husband George Karras. I had never fully processed a collection before, and was excited not only to learn more about the steps involved, but also learning more about Mead Smith Karras. I felt an affinity to her, since I had also spent three years living and working in Japan in my mid-twenties.
The initial stage of surveying and processing took longer than I had expected, but I wanted to be very careful with the material that was sometimes quite fragile. I also spent time going back through my notes and the collection in order to understand its strengths as well as to determine the intellectual order that would be a best fit for the pieces that were no longer in their original order. The monthly reports, office memorandum, and correspondence were placed in chronological order within their own series. Other materials, such as the nearly 2,500 photographs in over eight different albums or the various printed materials like the kamishibai (“paper theater stories”) or posters, were organized by size in order to make the most use of the space allotted for the collection. While completing the final step of writing the description and the finding aid for the collection, I spent a lot of time looking at other finding aids and studying how to express the information about the collection that I had gathered in a digestible way.
I learned a lot about the steps that go into processing a collection, even one of relatively small size like the Mead Smith Karras papers that I worked on for an entire semester. My favorite pieces to discover were the kamishibai as well as the question cards from a conference Karras spoke at in Osaka. The kamishibai were used as story lessons for youth in the workforce and were beautifully illustrated. The question cards, written by Japanese women who attended the conference, gave a tangible link to the women of that time and the concerns they had in the the workforce.
Working on the Mead Smith Karras papers was a great experience and I’m glad to have had the chance to both process and learn about the historical insight this collection has to offer.
Gordon W. Prange Collection 
[…] [This is a guest post written by Ashley Victoria Haddix, an iSchool Field Studies Intern for Fall 2017 in the Prange Collection. Also see her personal reflection blog post.] […]